Most gaming laptops—including budget machines—have comfortable, deep-travel keyboards that cushion your fingers during long gaming sessions. This Dell model’s blue-backlit keyboard felt crisp, snappy, and responsive but a bit shallow to us, so it was not as comfortable after a few hours of gaming or typing as some of the other laptops we tested. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but we do prefer the feel of the keyboards on the Lenovo Y530 and Asus TUF Gaming FX504GM.

Although dedicated graphics are always the dream, not all of us can afford to splurge. There many options out there with integrated graphics that will play many of the most popular games on the market on top of every golden oldie under the sun. HP is known for their line of budget laptops, which are popular with budget-conscious buyers who are after laptops that offer more than just word processing and Internet browsing.

But of course, the same advantage goes for gaming laptops as it does for every laptop, and it’s portability. What they lack in regards to raw power, they make up for by balancing power and portability extremely well, so if you need a gaming computer that you can easily carry around with you wherever you go, then a gaming laptop is still definitely worth the money.
RAM: Gaming can be RAM intensive, and 8GB is what we recommend for even average productivity tasks. If you can, you should go for 16GB on a gaming PC. A laptop with a GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti usually comes with 8GB. Once you get to a GTX 1060 or higher, some will come with 16GB of RAM. If you can’t get your laptop with 16GB of RAM now, consider upgrading it in the near future. Memory is upgradeable in many gaming laptops, so this is an area that you can consider boosting later if you’re handy with a screwdriver.
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If you're looking for a cheap gaming laptop to buy, the Ideapad Y700 should be at the very top of your list. It has an amazing price-to-performance balance, one of the best of all budget laptops we've found. The Ideapad features the very fast Intel Core i7-6700HQ at 2.6 GHz, which clocks in at over 10,000 points on Geekbench. This ensures that you have plenty of CPU power to multi-task and play games on high settings. The CPU is cleverly paired with the popular NVIDIA GeForce 960M. It's currently the best mobile graphics card for people on a budget.
The dedicated MX150 is Nvidias latest generation budget mobile GPU with improved performance over the previous generation 940MX. Multitasking will also not be much of problem, as the RAM will allow you to run quite a few applications and browser windows at once, though an upgrade to 16GB of RAM is also possible. It comes with a somewhat small SSD, affording you only 256GB of storage, but you can always add an additional SSD or HDD if needed.
Alienware is taking up to $760 Off Select Gaming Laptops and Desktops. Excellently priced but with a limited number of units available for a limited time. Free Shipping. Many of these PCs won Editor's choice or are recommended from various publications like PCMag and Computer Shopper. Some desktops feature the new GeForce RTX graphics cards. Some best bets:
OriginPC - If you’re getting an Origin, it’s probably because you want customization options. The company offers a wide variety of paint jobs and skins and lets you choose from an array of different processors, GPUs and overclocking options. You can also get thermal compounds to keep things cool and you can even pick the exact RAM and storage you want.
I've noticed more companies are starting to embrace the loud, clicky joy that is the mechanical keyboard. Known for their marvelous springy feedback and trademark clicking sound, these keyboards offer some of the best typing you're going to get on a laptop. In addition to the MSI GT83VR Titan, you can also get a mechanical keyboard on the Lenovo Ideapad Y900.
One of the typical features that sets apart a gaming laptop is a colorful, backlit keyboard. These vary quite a bit from model to model, with more elaborate backlighting going hand-in-hand with higher prices and a higher general level of other components. Almost all budget gaming laptops will employ single-color backlighting (most often, red or white) to keep costs down. The next step up is lighting programmable by zone, with three or four blocks of the keyboard independently customizable in different colors, but this is not common in budget machines. Keyboards with per-key, individually programmable lighting are the province of high-end machines only.
Performance is excellent; the quad-core Intel Core i7-7700HQ is a great chip not only for gaming, but for video editing as well, while the GTX 1060 graphics hardware is more than good enough for the latest games at High settings in Full HD. Round that off with a bit of old-school design charm and an excellent keyboard, and you have a very attractive machine.
The Nitro 5 isn't as polished as Dell's offerings and Acer doesn't currently offer it with a GTX 1060 GPU. But it starts as low as $650 with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 or $730 with 1050Ti graphics. That's some beefy performance for not much money (as gaming laptops go, anyway) and while there are a few cut corners, you still come out ahead overall.
Powerful hardware isn’t the only consideration. A gaming laptop’s processor and graphics card produce a lot of heat, and if the laptop doesn’t have an effective cooling system, it can overheat. The laptop also needs a good keyboard and solid build quality. Even though Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 can run games on high settings at 4K resolution, we still recommend 1080p displays because 4K screens are currently too expensive for most of our readers.
Speaking about the exterior of the laptop, it comes with a decent star gray color finish and stands out in looks from any other ordinary laptop out in the market. Moreover, it comes with great ergonomics making it comfortable to hold. Speaking about the specifications of the device, under the hood, the laptop is powered by an Intel Core i5-8250U quad-core processor paired with an 8GB of RAM. It sports a 15.6-inch Full-HD NanoEdge display with ASUS’s splendid software enhancement to safeguard the user’s vision even after prolonged usage. Storage on the laptop is backed by a 1TB hard drive which offers more than enough room to store all your favorite games, photos, music, movies and other data.
The world’s most advanced display technology can currently be found on the Alienware 13″ which is equipped with an OLED display! OLED technology is capable of displaying brilliant colors, reproducing 220% of the sRGB spectrum, and offering good luminosity. Unfortunately, due to its high cost, this technology has not yet been widely implemented by manufacturers.
Updated Nov. 25 at 5:45 a.m. ET: You can snag some inexpensive gaming laptops for great prices through Cyber Monday. The Lenovo Legion Y530 is on sale for $100 off from Best Buy, while the 15.6-inch Dell G3 can be had for $649 from Walmart — a savings of $350. The Dell G5 is also on sale for $899 from Walmart ($400 off!) A sale at eBay knocks the MSI GL63 down to $969, for a savings of $229. Check out our Cyber Monday hub for more fantastic deals.